Pricoa refinances Bishopsgate tower with £182m loan

Pricoa Mortgage Capital has provided a £181.5m refinancing loan for China Life’s and the Qatar Investment Authority’s 99 Bishopsgate tower in the City of London.

The fixed-rate facility has a term life of 10 years and is believed to reflect a loan-to-value ratio of around 55%.

China Life and the Qatar Investment Authority recently completed their acquisition of an 80% stake in the 26-storey tower from Canada’s Brookfield Office Properties. The sale valued the tower, which is fully leased, at £330m to £340m.

Brookfield financed its 2012 purchase of 99 Bishopsgate with £130m of senior debt from Wells Fargo, Aareal Bank and Santander. That facility was thought to equate to around a 55% loan-to-value ratio.

The latest Pricoa loan follows a number of recent deals which has seen it deploy more than £736m in the UK.

Last week, it provided a £130m, nine-year loan at 3.07% to GCP Student Living for its purchase of Scape Shoreditch in London. In August, it made a long-term, £155m loan to Enddora Holdings and Birchal Limited Partnership to partially refinance a portfolio of Access Self Storage properties. And in May, it provided a £270m, 10-year facility to Oxford Properties to refinance London’s Watermark Place.

“We’re in a competitive environment but leading into the summer we were willing to push a little harder to get the deals we really liked and that has helped our performance this year,” said Aaron Knight, director of European originations at Pricoa.

“We focus on core, core-plus but we’re also comfortable with alternative asset classes like the self storage deal we closed in August. If you look back 18 months, we executed a €240m Q-Park carpark deal in the Netherlands and we’re also active in both the student housing and also the private rented sector. We don’t have to stick to office, retail and industrial, we’re more than happy to play in the alternative space,” said Knight.

Pricoa, which is the commercial mortgage lending business of Prudential Financial, has a European loan book of about $2.5bn, about 70% of it in the UK. It has more than $87.3bn in assets under management globally as of June 2015.